Grocking Out - 3rd place interview with Pankaj Mishra

This week we catch up with the winners of the Grockit 'What Do You Know?' Competition, which ended on Feb 29th. The challenge was to predict which review questions a student would answer correctly when studying for the GMAT, SAT or ACT. Pankaj Mishra placed 3rd, in his first ever Kaggle competition, and offers some great tips for how to get started.

What was your background prior to entering this challenge?

I am a Software Developer with an undergraduate degree in Aeronautics. I learned machine learning from the free Stanford Machine Learning class at ml-class.org and the AI class at ai-class.com. Big thanks to Andrew Ng, Sebastian Thrun, and Peter Norvig for teaching those classes so well!

What made you decide to enter?

I participated to gain experience in machine learning. I was excited to get access to high quality real-world data from Grockit and use it to solve a concrete problem.

What preprocessing and supervised learning methods did you use?

Preprocessing:

I used Java to create a training file with one row (training example) for each user who answered five or more questions. Each row corresponds to the last question for a user. I added many columns to capture fraction-of-correct-answers-by-user, question-difficulty, etc.

Supervised learning methods:

My solution is a mixture of a Neural Network ensemble and a Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) ensemble. Both of them were trained on the same training data. The training data included columns that themselves were predicted values from other models such as various Collaborative Filtering models, IRT Model, Rasch Model, and the LMER benchmark. This approach to blending is inspired by the paper "Collaborative Filtering Applied to Educational Data Mining" [see Section(3): Blending]. None of my individual models scored very well on the leader board, but they did much better when combined together.

What was your most important insight into the data?

There were some columns in the training data (e.g. number of players for a question) that I did not use in my earlier models because I had thought they would have no effect on whether a user got the question right. I was surprised to discover later that adding them to the model did improve prediction accuracy. So I think the lesson is to not listen to your intuition; let data speak for itself. In practice, though, there is not enough time to try every possible feature, so we do have to go by intuition to a degree.

Were you surprised by any of your insights?

I was surprised by the low correlation between (1) an individual model’s performance by itself and (2) the amount of performance improvement of an ensemble when the individual model is added to it. As an example, I had some very good individual models that when added to an ensemble barely improved the performance of the ensemble. By contrast, I also had some nearly hopeless models that when added to an ensemble significantly improved the performance of the ensemble.

Therefore, we need lots of diverse models in the ensemble for good performance, not necessarily the best performing models. I think that is well known, but I was still surprised to observe it first hand.

Which tools did you use?

Java and R.

I used Java for pre-processing and building various Collaborative Filtering models and IRT models.

I used R's nnet and gbm packages for Neural Networks and Gradient Boosting Machine respectively.

What have you taken away from this competition?

The most fun way to get better at machine learning is to work really, really hard to win a machine learning competition. When I started in December, the leaderboard had many players with much better score than mine. However, for me, the knowledge that a much better model existed was a strong motivator for finding it, and I spent virtually all my free time researching and looking for better models and techniques.

Kaggle's forums for various competitions have top quality user generated content containing practical machine learning techniques that one does not find in text-books. I learned at least 2-3 techniques that helped me improve my score.

One can find readily applicable techniques and models in the papers from winners of other competitions. I read almost all the papers from the Netflix challenge, Heritage Health Prize, and KDD Cup 2010. The papers from the winners of "KDD Cup 2010 Educational Data Mining Challenge" contain a wealth of information relevant to the Grockit competition.

Satish

Hi, I tried several ways to get in touch with Pankaj Mishra but in vain. I found this post to be my hope. Can you please help? Can reach me through my email with this comment. I appreciate your help.

Margit Zwemer

Hi Satish. You can use the Contact User button on his profile to reach out.